Donations are essential to keep Write Out Loud going    

Charcoal scales

In spite of it all, we stand here smoking
The dark is speaking a common tongue 
The rain is beating a common drum
In spite of it all, the fire churns
Young heart yearns for age
Brainwashed rage taught page by page
Enslaved by minimum wage
Final stage predetermined 
Doesn't matter how much you're earning
Look at that cigarette you're burning - 
Bring that Camel through a needles eye
Same...

Read and leave comments (1)

🌷(3)

Tap in

Your eyes are on backwards, you're speaking in tongues
Expelling rancid breath from corrupted, rotting lungs
Breaking all the rungs on your plummet down the mineshaft
Rehearse, react, try to quote fact to the faceless
Spaceless outside brain, watching rain stain window
Bend low and embrace me, or mace me, debase me
Give it time and time will erase me, and thee

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷(2)

Gliding scales

Up in those dry hills
Eating oranges, squeezing lemons
Fog like fingers in the morning,
billowing up the rattling crevasses 
On the cusp of the cornice 
Cutting cables in our recklessness,
our burning plastic dreams
Broken glass seams sewed together
with a blowtorch
Become one with the roach, the rat,
prepare to live and die like that

Read and leave comments (2)

🌷(4)

Shrinking tax

What you want is not always what you need
You get off your pills and forget how to see
Cower and plea, trenches and artillery 
We live at home peacefully while we bomb children overseas
Graveyards among trees, flies landing as they please 
What types of days are these, falling away it seems
Trying to achieve my dreams, self sabotage by any means
Holding four queens and a two, stinky bag in ...

Read and leave comments (1)

🌷(1)

Playing with chalk

A mood where you want tea.
A white dove ascends,
solitary and unafraid.

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷(3)

Brushy creek pools

You're my living paintbrush,
charcoal glossy scales
Emeralds swimming upstream,
tried to catch and failed
Printed on thin paper,
your darkly rounded eye
Color of cloudless sky
on shining lateral line
Cut out white fillets
right along the spine

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷(1)

Smashing teacups

A sentence and a cell,
the American dream of hell,
melted Liberty bell,
getting sick of the smell,
can you tell how long it's been?
do you trust this cage you're in?
do you trust this rage within?
initial impact then spin,
centrifugal friend,
soul bouncing inside cold, dead, skin

Read and leave comments (2)

🌷(2)

Implement in increments

Life rolls on even when you don't want it to
Trying to find the hidden mechanism of stillness
The thrill is gone, smoked up on the back porch
Holding wicked torch, lighting up lines of houses
Blouses held open to the wind, waiting on rain to send them running
Mumbling through gas station interactions, floorgaze reaction
Gaining traction through inaction, empty rattling boxcar soul
Always di...

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷(2)

False floor

Your heart is full of knots, tying up my thoughts
Tabbed tongue, seeing dots, making peace with the day I rot
Dripping spit and snot, different pills to break blood clots 
Cliffside doves diving into ditches, falcons on the fences
Relentless, fingers of lightning brightening false hope
Fate the same as a short drop on a long rope

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷(3)

Chilopsis linearis

Contracting sheets of limestone rough, tough rugged eyes among tumbled bluffs
Crumbled stuff, sending you down into the yellowjackets, swatting mad tumble
Mud and algae, sweat, lost glasses, lost off our asses on some strong stuff
Ending up on the long end of someone else's courtesies, lucky they didn't murder me
Words are brief, meaningless most times, too centered on our own rhymes
Focused ...

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷(1)

Scribble shell

Sew some tears into your sleeves
Save them for me later, please
Hanging like the sword of Damocles
Scratching at imagined fleas
Ignoring all the shouted pleas
Bodies cold like frozen peas
Sailing blindly in heavy seas
Dreaming of dry land and trees

Read and leave comments (2)

🌷(4)

Fingermusic

Splinters shivering into cold graves,
  harden them with chemicals,
   garden out the minerals,
    rip out all the ventricles

Bleeding, tossed, time lost, gauze on  
  the spit covered carpet,
  gray shades in darkness,
   efficient, artless

Fingernails digging into forearms,
  smells like worms,
  inhabits urns,
    vomits

Split pea soup into the chicken coup,
  good green gra...

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷(1)

Pholcidae

Dead men drinking air through reeds
Dodge city splitting pretty pennies
Rust out all that pocket change
Evil, evil human brain
Beaten with rods of dry cane
Offshoot, soft soot face paint
Make me grey, flick ashes away
Day after day, revolving ridiculousness
Dreams crushed delirious and flat
Flys landing on cuts through the cracks
"I used to drink wine" she cries, tries to laugh
Chewing ...

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷(1)

Bipolar disorder. Mental healthloss of humanity

Mo

You went away on a gray rainy day,
Dr. Night cried under clouds
Forgive my selfish tears, from this pain you must be free
You are my brother, you'd do the same for me
I told you I'd see you on the other side, guess I'll wait and see
Until then know I carry you in my heart and memory

Read and leave comments (1)

🌷(2)

SAPI plates

Sage bush smoking sour
Eyes cascading showers
Measuring sober hours
Chewing my cigarettes now
Good coffee, good chow
Pretentious fuck saying thou
Pissing off the bow, drunk
Crawl back in my rack
Afloat but still sunk
Cold icey dunk
Casket of grinding gears stuck
Struck, sliding into silence

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷(2)

bipolar disordermental healthmental illness

Trading ink for sanity

Sky running past orange bobber,
 hair full of scales
Moon beheading the queen
 of cicadas and nails
Heart hardening like concrete,
 eyes blistering salt
Naturally finding fault,
 cut clean to the bone
Lighting all the candles in our
 little sinking home
Fish making processions,
 I'll never be alone

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷(1)

Trinket x

The only blade I fear is the one that I wield
A single stroke and my fate is sealed
Hold up false hope, impotent shield
Casually spread my bones in untilled fields
Digging in my heels,
  it feels like I'm losing you
Digging out six square,
  soul bruising blue
Brick slit bullshit, courtyard contortions, fountains of weeds
Walking in ovals, squares
Blackboard becomes the backboard of your...

Read and leave comments (1)

🌷(3)

bipolarbipolar disordermental illness

Cylindropuntia imbricata

I remember what you did to him, tried to do to me
I remember their faces, their names, the blood on my lapels
Learned a whole lot about what not to do
I cannot put into words how much I hate you
It churns inside me like a lamp that burns poison
A steel cage full of diesel smoke, salt water, and us
Look me in the eye
Rip it up infront of me again
Break all my stuff again
Send me to the edg...

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷(1)

Bugs coming out of our noses

Pissing out all the cold coffee
Burning out the last smoke
Scrape that shit off your face,
  dull razor

Waiting on the next inevitable tragedy
Bodies hidden under gravel heaps
Don't have a plan to stay alive
Get in the car,  just drive
Watch planets collide

Guerillas goose stepping through graveyards
No stone unturned
No concern for the collateral
Make those bodies fall
Your kids ...

Read and leave comments (0)

Botanophila discreta

Replanting my soul into a bitter bowl of charcoal
Poking holes in muddy soles to let stagnant water run
Up to our knees, up to our necks, screaming steel tomb
Algae will one day bloom on my bleached bones

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷(2)

Wilting soul

Spiraling down into heaps, ragged and gray, cracked crockpot hip sway
How many times a day do the flies find dead lips
Violence equips violence, self perpetuated static hate
Powers of state observed through grates, through threadbare shirts as they disintegrate
Inflating the lie, runflat tires crushing thighs, for his mom he cries
How do your eyes hold dripping pitchers back, how much empathy...

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷(1)

hopemental illness

Mojim drugovima

Out of jaded blackness you come,
My stomach dances, what are the chances
Full moon lances through twisted branches,
juniper limbs leaning, back lit silhouettes
Pools overflow to rivulets, streams, dreams,
bodies clean and washed for a funeral
When the sea gives up her dead, they will
walk amongst us in seaweed clothing
Loathing our fate, being born under this
evil star
Sew up the scar wi...

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷(2)

Crow, crescent, sunfish

Lazy and lethargic
Loopy and lost
Little dizzy dots dancing through glass
Distorted and reorganized daily
Finding wiser ways warily
Cutting rosemary from the dirt
Megahertz blurt thoughts into blankness
Blankets on the back porch
Roaches in the feed corn
Violating duties sworn
Better to be never born
Steel shorn clean, violently
Violets growing amongst ivy
Mahogany inseparably blendin...

Read and leave comments (0)

Marble Guerrilas

Tumbling through days
Figuring out ways
Whys are harder

Read and leave comments (0)

x.

Plastrick

This place is a cheap trick
Exposed at the root
Like a cavity, a pus ridden sore
It must be lanced, purged, cleaned
Cleaned of the false human impression:
That we matter

Read and leave comments (0)

Famine

War is mental illness,
  there is no pill
   that can save us
    from ourselves.

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷(3)

Empty me of empathy

Information age, 
disinformation age
Plastic pillaging vikings
Lightning striking,
same place twice
The snow started light, 
Romans stumbling through the night,
dream of coming in from the storm 
Boiler room pruno scored, 
white crosses cross my heart
Steam cuts broom apart, 
magic tricks in the dark
Nightmares of oily black smoke,
metal ladder last legitimate hope, 
lungs screaming,...

Read and leave comments (0)

Room for creamer

Eyes gone dull, receding into comatose
Fingers full of dirt and hope, spinning sunflower
Power and lack thereof, the perception of those above looking down at the masses
These clashes seem to me, a supply chain theory, I want what you got, bombs pour out
Military industrial ore, we pour out the lifeblood of our children for soil
Foil snake, famished toil, napalm boils your tea
Three, one two...

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷(1)

Mule deer lights

Headlamp illuminates glass, fear has passed like summer showers
Hours and hours of waiting for you, dandelions grew in pace
A face, name forgotten, incubating heartfelt goodbyes
Forever cries to the moment, forward movement, unconscious atonement
Blowing it, down and destroyed and dead, call it a solution
Solvents fluid, plastic, pollution, unscrewing the lid to the genie jar
Listed over to ...

Read and leave comments (0)

Plastic plague

I bow to you
tomorrow
swallowing up the sorrowed coffee grounds
impeding the hounds nipping at heels
wheels turned square and useless
another night spinning into that dark corner
last light out in the early mourners morning
sea is storming at all solid things
waiting on what low tide brings
driftwood and nylon strings
plastic, man's own plague
the limelight shifts
species exit stage

Read and leave comments (0)

3:25

Concrete eats shoes
Scarred watermelon tattoo
Taking stitches out in ward shower
Cover the window with wet toilet paper towel
How many damn deserts
How many memories forgotten to this thing
A handful of pills keeps me in motion
It's 3:25 and I'm lost in the ocean
Pigs and chickens on my heels

Read and leave comments (0)

Umbilical

Bodies in the shape of dollar signs
Distorted black tar cigarette eyeliner
Another pack snuffed half smoked
Another lineup of tablets,
why do the colors always
change
Blown down sycamore leaves weaving patterns
Laughter and lanterns, sitting outside the glow
Moths covered in ice crystal italics
All the plants dying in her garden
for the last
time

Read and leave comments (0)

Bacteria culture

Cannibal soul, eat up everything, push out poison
Convert caloric content into hate, burn with it
Strike out blind, walk reckless in the night
Snuffed out lights in the primordial gloom
Neanderthal watched homosapien pronounce his doom
Sinking into rotten blooms of hyacinth, half hearted resistance
Guess I'll just drown

Read and leave comments (0)

Ardea herodias

Emeralds swimming under low water crossing
Cypress roots give footing to rushing water
Lines and hooks, tokens shook from biting mouths
Striking south, towards sea, would walk blindly
To where brine meets, take a seat, wait for curtains, repeat

Read and leave comments (0)

West South stain, passed daily

I hope to meet you somewhere after all this
I'll make it up in quiet time, I promise
Gentle, quiet, time, from stream to sea, think of all the lives washed through
Into raging torrents we hurl ourselves, unaware of the tide
Slack water in my soul, everything gone flat
Cardboard houses filled with cats, calico comrades
Find a corner in the dark and stare
Light the lamps so the fish can find ...

Read and leave comments (0)

Condition: Human

On the brink of mirth, lip split vertical,

 bleeding surgical mask

Tapping Nelson's cask,

 sipping static ash

Electronic clash, striking through,

 silence moves around you like

  clouds

Life sprints away in leaps and bounds,

 bound to end up somewhere,

  bound to fate

Juniper seperates me from rocky track,

 don't wan't to go back,

  sick of drymouth walking

A...

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷(1)

Assembly line insanity

Cutting branches from the mercy tree
Pouring hemlock into afternoon tea
No retreat, simply flee, chaotically
History, repeated, rebuked,
taught in hollow echoes
Crisp lies, carefully crafted confusion
Truth becomes illusion,
don't trust your own eyes
Die with no reason why
Assembly line insanity, our vanity
A species eating itself alive

Read and leave comments (3)

🌷(1)

Asphalt us

Mid day wake up, med cup, emptied into open palm, balled up
Left, everything just left, like a morning smoke burnt down
Bound to fail, lay low, hail on the tin roof out back of the cove
A grove, cut down, covered in asphalt and heat and us

Read and leave comments (0)

Nyx/Nox

I called into the darkness,
only shadows replied with their silence
Surrounded and juxtaposed,
men senselessly exchanging violence
You can't survive this, involuntary birth,
existence the mirth of a blind God
A blind fraud, a sadist, preaching morality from the bloody pulpit
Your last hot cup of coffee, your last half smoked cigarette
The lights are about to flip off for a while, greet it ...

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷(2)

militaryBipolar disorder. Mental healthtired

11:58 & a stack of pennies

Living life with everything you own stuffed into bags, two of them, dragging yourself
along
Living for that hour on the phone, once a day where you can really breathe
again
By blind luck or some odd chance I stand barefoot on this cold, tile, floor,
tonight
Coughing out the last drag of a cigarette, waiting for the last load to finish spin
cycle
Crammed into rooms of what were once strange...

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷(2)

Dry Aloe

Pour poison on the anthill, white stinking powder
Weeds sprout among flowers, days broken into hours
Leaving my cigarette butts all around town, every ashtray
Trying to find a way, forward or anywhere honestly
The circle I'm stuck in has me seeing meteor showers
Peeking out curtains in the dark, looking for something, cold and yearning
Discerning the turning point, dogs barking at shadows
S...

Read and leave comments (0)

Bacteria culture

Cannibal soul, eat up everything, push out poison
Convert caloric content into hate, burn with it
Strike out blind, walk reckless in the night
Snuffed out lights in the primordial gloom
Neanderthal watched homosapien pronounce his doom
Sinking into rotten blooms of hyacinth, half hearted resistance
Guess I'll just drown

Read and leave comments (0)

Slave of the flies

It's coming now, quickly, in the twilight eyes dialed
Wild, child grown on drip plastic poison
Smoking coffin nails in our boredom
It feels like a kiss every time our sight meets
Fat dying flies speak louder than me, shouting wings
Hope clings to anything with traction in its seams
Blow another gram of the dying American dream

Read and leave comments (0)

Bimaculoides

A tumbling river of psychosis, towing me down the line
Finding the speaking tree, where the levee bends skyward
Eyes open we shelter shock our dirty socks into piles
then flop down in arms spent days in
  shaking for longing
    longing for being held

A strange place to find yourself, down this road tonight
Bright lights on tip toe through the needle sharp live oak
Cough up and choke on ...

Read and leave comments (0)

Cauterized wire heart

Everything is too damn dollars
Pills swallered'
Tar shot up
We snot up crusty mornings
Spent in mourning
Miss you Skeeter
Open coffin never stopping words we flossing
Learn to be a boss and casually deal with loss
Find your cause, a little bit of it, bite in the hip of it,
don't let go
Take a ride, see the show, you could die tomorrow,
who knows?
Don't skip the snow cones, lots of syru...

Read and leave comments (0)

Ceelo

Pushing chains, working lanes, find a gap and we rush up
Soft, never fast, like a puppy I hush up
Sup from a big cup, Big Red in my guts, breakfast tacos for lunch
Piles of jalapenos and one tattooed on my arm
Right above Bailey I'm a fool, she's gone
Now I am sitting here rhyming out thoughts
Making quick movements, dropping dimes spinning tops
The meat factory never shuts off
The blades ...

Read and leave comments (0)

Smoking lamp

The smoking lamp is out,
get down in your cut holes,
fresh dig,
crushed cig,
ash reduced to stinking cender filter,
wilt her favorite flower behind dusty glass,
flashback flashbang,
blinding myself in my own brokenness,
a toy in pieces on the floor

Read and leave comments (0)

Tare tare tare 0.00

Tired heart overflowing, brim of pitcher bubbling, red and frothing
I sing out into the night, dark coats of gray and black, screeching white fluorescence taunting
The wrong thing to bottle up, nitroglycerin in your cup, slapped down
You wake up with a frown, chase those pills straight down with sink water
Chemical dependance for sanities sake, my life is a case opportunities not taken
Things...

Read and leave comments (0)

The moon is shooting lightning bolts

A word that screams, torn
A child that's born, into hunger,
ribs sticking out
Coming from under is a real thing, violence too
How violent would you be if you was hungry too?
Selling our health at a chance at a lie
Credit card bills and new drugs to try
Settling scores with no reason why
Killing eachother over eye for an eye
He's human too, just like you
Think about all the things he went...

Read and leave comments (0)

Black mulch

Switchin up my smokes, inhale broken hailstones and rhinestones on your cheekbone
Scarred and regal, eagles claw in claw plummeting, no care for ground or impact
Retract all the bad thoughts that keep you from sleeping, turning little top in the corner of the room
A clutch of blooms, rotting and hyacinth and wet on your fingers, the scent lingers
Burning sage in every last corner, one day smud...

Read and leave comments (0)

Show more entries …

This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse, you are agreeing to our use of cookies.

Find out more Hide this message